Frank Damp interview 2015

Members of Northwest Norton Owners interviewed Frank Damp in 2015. Many stories of his life. I recorded it and have it in a word document- 24 pages. Can I post it here or attach as a file somehow? I could do it in one page a day posts if you like
Doug

Interview with Frank Damp (ex-Norton engineer), Douglass Harroun, Joe Smith, John Curry at the Majestic Hotel, Anacortes, Washington 5-6-15

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Frank: I have been riding motorcycles since I was 16 years old. You could not get a car license till you turned 18, so I started up with a Vespa, then moved up to Ariel Leader which is a 250 cc two stroke twin and then a BSA A-7.



I did an engineering apprenticeship with what is now British Aerospace,starting immediately after leaving high school, and finished up with a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering. I got married and I dropped out of motorcycling for a while because we'd had a couple of kids.



After a major layoff from BAe (over 6000 people). I switched to working in the machine tools industry in Coventry for a couple of years until the government imposed a wage freeze. They did not impose a price freeze, so everybody’s spending power went down.



I saw an ad in the paper for a position at Norton as a development engineer and I applied for it and was hired. I did it for almost 2 years, but I could see that Norton was in trouble. What they hired me for, they couldn’t fund. My experience in the aerospace and machine tools industries was primarily in test instrumentation. It was fairly clear that the motorcycle industry did everything by opinion and they hired me to build a test instrumentation setup so that they could actually measure things.



We were going to get recording equipment that used radio telemetry that would fit in the team van, so that we could actually take the bikes out on test and record what the performance was like. Unfortunately, management frittered away all the funds for that with a PR outfit on the infamous green hemispherical blob “badge” they came up with to replace the classic “Norton” script insignia. badge



Joe: We see them on the odometer.



Frank: We were still doing things by opinion: “well, I think it is this, and this rider thinks it is that”. You just could not get any decent data from anybody. We actually released the Commando to the public at the 1967 motorcycle show which I think was in October .and at that point it went from experimental development status into production status, The Commando program all moved to London to the AMC Plumstead Works, and I started working on AJS Stormer motocross bike.



D: No P 11s?

Frank: Well, we just had a P11 in there for research for a very brief time. As far as I understood it, the company did not even know the P11 existed. It was a development in the US by the west coast importer.



John: AJS Stormer, was that in Birmingham?

Douglass Harroun said:

Members of Northwest Norton Owners interviewed Frank Damp in 2015. Many stories of his life. I recorded it and have it in a word document- 24 pages. Can I post it here or attach as a file somehow? I could do it in one page a day posts if you like
Doug

Click to expand...

Hi Doug, that's very kind and I'm sure would be of great interest here. I think if you P.M. L.A.B. he can post it as a sticky.

Cheers,

cliffa.

Ditto ! ... great as a sticky. R.I.P. Frank Damp.

OK- here's a few more: ( continued)

Frank: No, Wolverhampton. It was a Norton Villiers program, like the Commando. Dennis Poore, a retired racing driver and millionaire industrialist, rescued Norton and merged it with the industrial engine manufacturer Villiers who also made motorcycle engines and gearboxes. The Norton Commando design and development team were located at the Villiers factory in Wolverhampton, just north of the Birmingham city limits. (looking at a map).

I am from up here, a place called Leyland. That is my hometown and that is where Leyland Motors was started, the home of the double-decker bus. They invented them back in the 1910s.

D: Did you know Peter Williams?

Frank: No. Only one famous guy, Peter Inchley. He was a road racer before he became Director of Competition and Development . He rode in the 1966 250cc TT on a Villiers-made bike. I got to know our top motocross rider, Malcolm Davis. There was a second M-X rider named Andy Roberton. I didn’t get involved with any of the real famous guys.

D: How about Mick Hemmings?

Frank: No, I knew of him, but never met him. Bob Trigg was the designer of the frame and one of the guys I worked with.

D: What about that widow-maker frame?


Frank: The concept was developed by the Managing Director, Dr. Bauer, who was a very talented man, with a Ph.D in combustion chemistry. Unfortunately,he did not know squat about motor cycles, but he came up with that frame design concept because he thought the Feather-bed frame was too flexible and vibration levels much too high. He wanted to completely break from tradition. It was a very stiff frame – the large top tube made it so, but they did not do enough structural testing to show up its weakness, which was where the gusset met the top tube, around the steering head. The flexing of the tube where that gusset was brazed on it caused it to crack. On the Stormer frame, which was a similar design, the tube went from the bottom of the steering head back to the seat and it had a gusset ahead of it. We got cracks directly opposite to the ones on the Commando. They were on the top half of the tube instead of the bottom half.


The Stormer didn't need the Isolastic cradle mounting of the engine as it was only a 250 (later also a 360) single cylinder 2-stroke.

D: Were you involved at all with the Combat with the high compression and high RPM?

Frank: No, I left the company in July 68, before that development. The Commando had only been on the street 6 months at that point and all they were making were the fastbacks.


D: Could you share one or two special funny stories either at work or at home on motorcycles?


Frank: Well I have one interesting experience, with the P11, actually. There had been an accident in California desert racing where the rider was killed. He apparently got into a monumental tank slapper and it pitched him off and he banged his head on a rock and it killed him. So we got a P 11 sent in from the states and it was the first time anybody had seen it. It had been designed by the US importer (Berliner?). He stuffed a 750 Atlas engine into a Matchless G 50 frame and did not do any testing on it.


What I found as I was breaking it in was that it weaved back and forth. There was some kind of directional instability that was really spooky. When you are on the freeway and using a whole lane width to weave back and forth in about a half mile wave length is very unpleasant The faster you go, the bigger the amplitude of this wave and since I was breaking-in a new bike, I was not going much over 60 mph. When the guy took over from me after it had been broken in he said, “oh it straightened out at 85”!


I did not have any accidents. I probably did 25,000 miles in a year. We were out there 8 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week. There was one incident on the Commando that did not cause any problems to me, but it sure as hell caused problems to the bike. I was on MIRA (Motor Industry Research Association) test track, which is a banked tri-oval. It was a Saturday morning, the place was quiet, and it was just us and an Aston Martin DB5 being tested. I was going around on the high bank which had a 100 mph neutral speed and I am doing about 105 mph. The Aston Martin is doing about 140 and passing me every so often. I happened to look behind me on one lap and he was maybe a quarter of a mile back. All at once the engine revs went off the clock, followed by an almighty bang, then silence. The final drive split link had pulled apart, the chain came off. We found the chain in a walk-round.



The engine was completely destroyed. It had hit high enough RPM for the valves to float. One valve had hit a piston and cracked it and the piston jammed in the bore and con rod pulled the wrist pin all the way out. When it got to bottom dead center, there was enough clearance in the crank case for it to fall over and punch a hole on the side. I coasted down off the high bank and managed to get down on to the flat lanes at the bottom as the Aston Martin went by. (laughs..)



Joe: Wait for the trolley?



Frank: Yeah, the van came out and towed it back to the pit.



D: I am going to ask a loaded question, which is better, Triumph or Norton?

I think it might be best if I make a page dedicated to Frank and we can link to it. Do you think that is a good idea?

Jerry

OK Jerry. I can give a word doc. Might be fun for the listers to read here also over the next few days, like a serial story in the old magazines/ papers
Doug

edit
I think in retrospect this is fine to post here instead...

Frank: Back then, Norton, no question. You know, things have moved along a lot since the last Nortons were built. I think the 750 Triumph/BSA Triple was a good bike and the modern Triumphs, the ones that are actually being manufactured now, are very good. Norton would be my vehicle of choice if I went back on a bike, but I don’t think I ever will.

D: Another trouble spot to ask Mr. Damp, what about the wet sumping. Is that a design flaw or is that a benefit?

Frank: It is something that happens. It is not designed to do it. Theoretically, it should stay in the oil tank, but when things start to wear, it will then drain into the sump. I had an incident with my company hack 650SS. I had an old 650SS as my drive to work bike, that had 130,000 miles on it, if you believe the odometer. I had not used it for few days, and I went to check the oil level and the tank was empty, so I put a quart in and all that was in the sump came out the filler cap as I was riding to work.

D: What about putting a turn- off switch in the oil feed from the tank? A lot of guys are doing that.

Frank: As long as you do not forget to turn it back on.

D: You post on Access Norton and I bet half of the posts there are about how to improve this classic design. What you think about those improvements?


Frank: Well there are some things that could be improved – it is a late 1960's design.. Of course, I only had the fastback experience. I did not see the 850 or the electric start or any of that stuff. I think stiffening to stop the frame from breaking certainly was a sound move. It would have been nicer if they done it the way we did it on the Stormer. We split the tube horizontally down the middle and we put a triangular gusset, so that it went from being oval (technically “ob-round”) at the head-stock end, to being circular at the back of the seat, but the AMC bean-counter said “too expensive”, so they put that Mickey Mouse extra tube in.

D: Well, you know, people are always trying to put a bigger camshaft and a higher compression. They are trying to go faster. What you think about all that?

Frank: I think the capability of doing 105 or so is fast enough for most people. To me it makes more sense to look at the comfort side of it, not the performance. “Go-faster” stuff just makes it more temperamental to start, particularly with the higher compression ratio, and it's bad enough to begin with. They are hard to kick over sometimes. Of course if you had electric start, you would be alright, I don’t know whether that original “electrically assisted” starter would handle higher compression.

Joe: Like the combat engine, 11:1?

Frank: Yeah, I think that was a bit over the top. It will be difficult to keep a combat in good shape with the kind of gasoline that we get these days. It was 103 octane in England in the old days when you got the really good quality stuff.



D: Mr. Damp did you say you had a bike with 130,000 miles?



Frank: That is what the odometer on the 650SS said.



D: How often did you adjust the points on that?



Frank: I think I never had to (laughing) even riding 45 miles each way to work each day for several months.



John: I have a 250 Manxman and it has got the magneto ignition.



Frank: Oh, that’s right, my SS did too.. Fortunately, it had a kill button. On one occasion somebody had changed the twin carburetors, and they put the slides back in the wrong ones. As I was going home from work, I blipped the throttle to go around a truck. Pulled in behind a bus and when I rolled the throttle off it stayed wide open. A 650 SS wide open in second gear heading towards the back of a double-decker bus was…. I was very glad of that kill button.



D: Mr. Damp, how old were you when you were at Norton?



Frank: Let’s see, early 20s.



D: Mr. Damp, men in their early 20s want a fast bike and they ride them fast. Did you do that?



Frank: Yeah, we did. (laughs)



D: You have to have some more stories about that?



Frank: There was no speed limit outside the cities when I started at Norton. The 70 limit on the freeway came in afterwards. When we were testing the Commando. I used to go up the M6 freeway from Wolverhampton to a place called Levens Bridge where there was a small restaurant that opened at 5 a.m. We started work at 4 when we were doing the endurance testing, and I tried to get there, 103 miles, before they opened. I would make it maybe 2 days out of 3 (laughing), 103 miles in an hour at 4 o’clock in the morning.



D Did you ever go to the Ace Café?



Frank: No. Too far down south. That’s in London, south part of London. Initially, all of the riding we did was within 50 miles of the factory. We would go around in figure

8’s around the Midlands, so that when it broke down, the van didn’t have too far to come and pick us up.

John: So, you would be road testing in public street with no speed limit?

Frank: We weren't on city streets much. There were limits in the cities, but none outside them. Everybody drove fast in those days.

D: Were you a mod or a rocker?

Frank: Well, since I was riding a motorcycle, I was a rocker.

D: Did you have the leathers?


Frank: Yes, one piece racing leathers actually for a while, and then I switched over to a Barbour jacket.

D: Did the girls like that?

Frank: I don’t know. You’d have to ask my wife. (laughing).

D: Tell us about how you met your wife and how you’re situated now?

Frank: We’d known each other since early childhood. Our families were both small shopkeepers. My family had a hardware store and her mom and dad had a green grocery. We got married in August 1964. We came out to the US for me to join Boeing after they hired me from England in 1968. I got laid off in 1971, hired back in 1974, retired in 1998 and we moved up to Anacortes in 1999.

D: Did you make some airplanes?

Frank: Well, I worked at Boeing, but I wasn’t actually on the production line. I was a simulation engineer for about 12 years in flight crew training. We had simulators for all of the models. We did the initial training for the airline pilots there. We lived in Bothell part of the time, then we moved to Everett. Then I left the flight crew training and became a customer engineer, who is the interface between Boeing and the airline buying airplanes.

D: You were at NASA, at Langley (Virginia)?

Frank: Yes, I spent 2½ years working for a contractor there and that’s actually where I became interested in simulation because that is what we were doing at NASA.

D: Mr. Damp, Langley is space travel.

Frank: In actual fact it has got a lot of airplane-related stuff. They had some very good wind tunnels. They had a dual simulator, interactive, so when you flew one simulator, your airplane appeared

your airplane appeared on the visual of second one and vice-versa. So you could see each other. You could fly combat. You could fly formations. We actually did quite a lot of work with the Israelis. They would come in and fly combat missions against each other in that simulator, 7 days a week, sometimes.



D: What happened when the Japanese started exporting their wonderful 2, 3, and 4 cylinder motorcycles. What did people think in England that were working with motorcycles? How they react to that?



Frank: Initially, we got the 250 and the 305 Dream. The English motorcycle industry said, well, the Japanese only made little bikes. We’re alright. We make big ones. Then here comes the 750 4-cylinder and it just blew everybody out of the water. That really started the final demise of Norton, and Triumph, and all the other smaller manufacturers. Greeves survived a fair length of time making their 2-stroke street trail bikes and so forth, but all the others were small companies and they probably made only 5 bikes a week.



D: Mr. Damp, you were riding test Nortons at a 100 miles an hour. Did you ever get on a Japanese bike and do that?



Frank: No, there were no big Japanese bikes. By the time I left England in 1968, the bigger Japanese machinery was only starting to make its appearance, and I didn’t have the interest really …having been a Norton guy, and I was emigrating from them to join Boeing. We had two kids, so motorcycles didn’t figure greatly in my leisure activities at that time.



Joe: Did you ever have a ride or have experience with the Norton singles, the Manx?



Frank: No, since it was Norton-Villiers that I was working for, it was exclusively centered on the Commando and the AJS Stormer (250 single 2-stroke) during my time there. All the other stuff was in London at the AMC factory at Plumstead.


D: Mr. Damp, your life experience spans World War II. Could you say a few words about that?



Frank: Only just. I was born in 1941, and we were a long way from the centre of activity in the war, which was all down south in London. The closest they came to my hometown in large numbers was when they bombed Liverpool, which was 30 miles away, where the Beatles are from. We did get a few stray bombs in the 6 miles or so around Leyland, but they were mostly from pilots who had got lost. The war was over in 1945 and I was only 4, so my exposure to it was pretty minimal, except my dad was in the Air Force. He was a chef and came back after de-mobilisation to run the family hardware store. The war really did not have any significant impact on us other than food rationing.



D: The manufacturing centers of England were flattened, those places where all these wonderful machines were made. How did they start back up?

Frank: They were rebuilt and repaired. Possibly insurance companies got cleaned out because they probably had insurance on the plant. I don’t know why we weren’t bombed. Leyland Motors were the biggest manufacturer of tanks for the Army. Just outside of Leyland town itself was the Royal Ordnance Factory and that was where the dam-buster bombs were made. They bombed the local railway yard where the engine sheds and so forth were. I think there was one bomb that hit a row of houses in a little town about 5 miles from where we lived. Well, that was it; we never got hit. When the bombers came over, they would come across the North Sea and hit eastern England, coming in from Germany and so those in the northwest rarely saw much activity at all.



D: Why is Britain not exporting cars and bikes?



Frank: Primarily, I think it is because they are in multi-national companies nowadays. You know, they are in with the French, they are in with the Germans. They tend to concentrate on their own home market, because you need right-hand drive. It is quite expensive to make double-sided. They do export Range Rovers, Land Rovers, and those SUVs are still exported, along with the new Triumph bikes. English cars got a reputation in the US in the 60’s as being rather fragile. People drove them a lot harder here than we did in England.



D: How does the British public regard the Royals?



Frank: With some affection. Particularly when they are having children. There is a lot of anti-Royal opinion around the world. It depends to a certain extent on which government is in power. But, I think that the Royal family are fairly well revered.



D: Is there anything you could have changed back in the ‘60s on those motorcycles, maybe to make them better or more durable?



Frank: The thing I would have liked to have done, which I was hired to do, was to be able to find out more about the inner workings when they were being ridden. We had absolutely no knowledge of what was going on, other than the opinions of the rider. We couldn’t measure anything, like the directional instability on the P11. We just had to play by ear. We just couldn’t do anything about it.



I also think probably it would have been good for the industry would if we were much better capitalized, because there was never enough money. If you don’t do it right, you hadn’t enough money to do it over, and so you are constantly on incremental improvements and in many cases what you are trying to improve wasn’t very good in the beginning. We were still doing push rod engines when other people were doing overhead cams.



I remember a prototype 750 overhead cam based on the Commando engine. And it had a chain-driven cam shaft. The chain was 3 feet 8 inches long, threaded up through the push-rod tubes into the head. The wear on that camshaft chain was incredible. The valve timing wouldn’t last more than a couple of hundred miles before you had to go tighten it.

The UK industry lacked the financial resources to do the kind of research that the Japanese did. They were too fragmented and had too many small companies. They did not have the engineering support those (Japanese) guys had.


D: Maybe the Japanese were superior at that time, but I would like to point out that a Norton in perfect condition is worth more than a Japanese bike in perfect condition today.


Frank: Yes.


D: And why do you think that is?



Frank: Rarity value, more than anything




D: Many people think that motor cycles have an intrinsic quality (some say a soul).



Frank: They have a personality, mainly because the way they are designed to be used, but to say they have a soul would be pushing it a bit too far. They certainly got more personality than some other machines like the Japanese ones.


D: Would you say that a modern bike is more like a sewing machine than a motor cycle?



Frank: No, it is still a motor cycle. It still rides like one. You know, it would be difficult to ride a sewing machine. (laughs)



D: What I mean is something that is so perfect…you turn it on, it always turns on. It always performs exactly. It never needs repair. It always goes straight if it is supposed to go straight and you just ignore it after a while. It is just an appliance, but a British motorcycle, if it has faults….you’ve got to love them and you accommodate them. You deal with them.



Frank: Well, you need a lot of patience and that is for sure. You spend a lot of time with your wrenches, which you would not have to do on a more modern Japanese bike.


John: I bought a new Triumph a month ago. The shop manual goes all the way to 90,000 miles. So hopefully it is realistic. But your Norton 650 SS went 130,000 miles. That is pretty impressive, I would say.



Frank: It was a company-owned bike, so if they can’t get one to go 130,000 miles, the average private owner sure as hell couldn’t.


D: Triumph’s had an oil filter in their crank shaft, a sheet metal tube that would go into to the crankshaft, but Norton never had that and I have seen and heard Norton’s did not accumulate sludge in there like Triumphs did.

Douglass Harroun said:

Frank: Yeah, I think that was a bit over the top. It will be difficult to keep a combat in good shape with the kind of gasoline that we get these days. It was 103 octane in England in the old days when you got the really good quality stuff.



D: Mr. Damp did you say you had a bike with 130,000 miles?



Frank: That is what the odometer on the 650SS said.



D: How often did you adjust the points on that?



Frank: I think I never had to (laughing) even riding 45 miles each way to work each day for several months.



John: I have a 250 Manxman and it has got the magneto ignition.



Frank: Oh, that’s right, my SS did too.. Fortunately, it had a kill button. On one occasion somebody had changed the twin carburetors, and they put the slides back in the wrong ones. As I was going home from work, I blipped the throttle to go around a truck. Pulled in behind a bus and when I rolled the throttle off it stayed wide open. A 650 SS wide open in second gear heading towards the back of a double-decker bus was…. I was very glad of that kill button.



D: Mr. Damp, how old were you when you were at Norton?



Frank: Let’s see, early 20s.



D: Mr. Damp, men in their early 20s want a fast bike and they ride them fast. Did you do that?



Frank: Yeah, we did. (laughs)



D: You have to have some more stories about that?



Frank: There was no speed limit outside the cities when I started at Norton. The 70 limit on the freeway came in afterwards. When we were testing the Commando. I used to go up the M6 freeway from Wolverhampton to a place called Levens Bridge where there was a small restaurant that opened at 5 a.m. We started work at 4 when we were doing the endurance testing, and I tried to get there, 103 miles, before they opened. I would make it maybe 2 days out of 3 (laughing), 103 miles in an hour at 4 o’clock in the morning.



D Did you ever go to the Ace Café?



Frank: No. Too far down south. That’s in London, south part of London. Initially, all of the riding we did was within 50 miles of the factory. We would go around in figure

Click to expand...

The Ace Cafe is in NW London, not south.

Frank: Not very much. I guess if you ride it hard enough. (laughs). Get the oil hot every time, maybe you don’t have that problem.




D: When someone buys a British bike here in the States, it has always got 5,000 to 7,000 miles on it. The bikes have not been run in many years. And maybe it has got parts taken off. Why is it that the British bikes, the speedometers have basically stopped at 7000 miles?



Frank: Good question. It might be that they have reached a point where if you do not ride them frequently…on my 650SS I rode the bike 80 miles, 5 days a week to and from work. The regular use kept everything running well. But you know, if it is a hobby bike, and you do not ride it frequently, it probably won't hold up very well. At 7000 miles, it might be getting to the point where it’s temperamental because you are not using it very much. I do not know how the Japanese ones would fare in that, the BMW’s either.


John: The Atlas and Commando. Do they use the same transmission as the Vincent?


Frank: They were of Norton manufacture, I am pretty sure. The Dominator series, the Atlas, the P11, the Commando all had the same basic transmission. I am pretty sure that Norton built their own.




John: How much horsepower can a Norton transmission take without failing?



Frank: I would think you could probably hitch it up to a 100 horsepower engine.

We cannot believe some of these power numbers you hear, but the stage 3 Commando was supposed to be 88 horse power. I do not think it was anywhere close to that.



Joe: Did you ever make it to the Ace Café? Ride there on a motorcycle?



Frank: No, it was way too far. It was a couple of hundred miles away. There were clubs everywhere really. The motorcycle riders were the Rockers and the scooter riders were the Mods.



John: Are you familiar with the 59 club.



Frank: Yeah.



Joe: And that had a lot of influence on…. people like the Rockers

.

Frank: I don’t think so They were pretty individualistic.



Joe: They are kind of like (us) Norton owners!

John: The 59 club was started by the Church of England. They claim they are the world’s largest motorcycle club now. In England they had orphans after World War II and the church stepped in to try to give them some guidance and they created this 59 club in 1959, non-denominational, for motorcycles. It became very popular, and they regularly hold rallies at the Ace Cafe which has also become iconic and now guys like Mick Jagger go there. They would buzz past at 100 miles an hour, it was a rite of passage and it became cool.



Joe: The louder and the faster, the more popular.



Frank: I don’t think there is anywhere near the the general usage of motorcycle as a form of transport now.



Joe: Scooters are bigger now.



Frank: Yes, but what what killed the motorcycle was the ride to work. The Austin/Morris Mini was a similar price to the Commando, so people switched to a car. You could get the Mini van which was the panel truck version of the Mini for two hundred pounds. When I bought my Vespa in 1958, I think I paid 96 pounds for it, brand new.


D: What was the pound versus the dollar then?



Frank: 2.40…two dollars 40 to a pound. It was legally frozen at that. Didn’t become a free floating currency till after we moved here. But a lot of people, a little older than me, when they were young and married, they would have motorcycle-sidecar combination. I remember a guy going into the Norton plant complaining bitterly about gas mileage. “They are all road tested to get 54 miles to the gallon. I am only getting 20 something”. So they were flabbergasted and said bring it in and we will check it out, so he brought it in. He has got a double adult sidecar.(laughing) and he carried his wife and two kids in this thing. No wonder he is only getting 28 miles to the gallon.



John: A lot of farm tractors are made in that same industrial area in England.



Frank: In fact, Massey Ferguson was only a couple of miles from where I worked in the machine tool industry. They had a big plant.



The old Leyland Motors factory was right smack in the middle of my home town. The population of Leyland, then, was about same as Anacortes, about eighteen thousand people. They reckoned that when everybody came to work, the population went up by a factor 5. We had Leyland Motors, Leyland & Birmingham Rubber Company, British Tyre and Rubber, Leyland Paint and Varnish, and several others, five or six big cotton mills- in a town the size of Anacortes.




John: BSA was a huge company, was it not?

Frank: Fairly big. BSA stood for Birmingham Small Arms. They were initially a weapons manufacturer. It is surprising how many motorcycle companies started out building weapons at some point.



Joe: I would think that the motorcycle is also a weapon.(laughing)



Frank: Well, a lot of the technology used to make guns is very much applicable for making motorcycles.



John: The machine tools, mechanic skills and all that are very similar.




Frank: In England people didn’t move around much, didn’t travel very far. You went on vacation 30 miles away to a seaside resort. You didn’t go to Germany or to Italy like you do now. We lived around 24 miles from the seaside, a town called Blackpool and three quarters of the people that lived in my hometown used to go to Blackpool on their summer vacations. We did when I was a kid. You would go to northwest coast or somewhere like that. People didn’t move around anywhere near as much as we do now. I came from the county of Lancashire which is a little bit further north of northern edge of Wales.


John: Do they speak English there?


Frank: Well, most people in Wales are bilingual. They speak English and Welsh.


D: Give us a word in Welsh

Frank: Well, I will give you a town name: Llanfairpwllgwyngichgogerychwrnddroblllantisiliogogogoch. (laughing) That is the name of a town. It is actually a sentence. When translated into English, it is something about the small village near the tree, by the waterfalls. There is a photograph from many years ago. There is a little railway station, a locomotive, two passenger cars and on the roof of the station is the name of the place. There is LLAN ahead of the engine and GOCH behind the last of the two carriages. The signboard was a full length of the station building.


John: I bought some parts out of a place, they spoke the Welsh language, but they also spoke English, so they explained that to me.


Frank: There are some places where Welsh is by far the majority language, but most speak English.


John: There is a strong movement to maintain the Welsh language, is that right?

Frank: It is a Celtic language, similar to the Irish Language in Ireland and it’s the same to some extent, even in Cornwall, west of Land’s End, which is officially part of England, the southern-most tip. They have a language similar to Welsh, but it is different. If you speak one, you can’t necessarily speak the other.


Joe: Everybody’s got a cousin down in Brittany, then.



Frank: You know, that’s where my family name, I think, comes from. The family originally popped up on the Isle of Wight which is an island in Southampton water, and the first place the Damp name appeared. Across in France is a little village called Ampier. And the theory is, when they came over and settled in England, they said we are from Ampier, which is d’Ampier and it eventually got shortened. Of course, the fact is that we were well engineers back about five or six generations, early 1800. They could find water underground using a willow stick ….there is water down there, so they would dig a well. And that is what we did. Water witches.



John: Do you have a college degree in engineering?



Frank: Yes. The college that I went to was the Royal College of Advanced, Technology Salford.. Salford is a small city adjoining Manchester. The degree was called a Diploma in Technology in Mechanical Engineering. In my last year the school became the University of Salford. And the degree became a bachelor’s degree.


D: And Boeing recognized that ?



Frank: Yeah. In fact, if I'd had the Dipl. Tech degree, I would have had a $1000 or more a year starting salary because it was considered equivalent to a US Master's Degree.


John: I’ve got a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and so I am well aware of how Boeing perceives that kind of education.



Frank: Yeah, when I took it, I was on apprenticeship with British Aircraft Corporation. The course was called a “sandwich” course where you go into college 5 days a week from January through till the first week of July. Then you go into industry from the second week of July through to Christmas on a training course designed by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. After 4 years of that, 6 months school, 6 months of work, 6 months of school, 6 months of work, I finished up with a fairly basic grounding in how engineering was run in the real world.


D: You met American-trained engineers in your career. How was their training? How was their capability compared to yours?



Frank: I think by the time you have been in an engineering job for 3 or 4 years, you couldn't really see the difference. But I think I had a better understanding of how engineering was done in the real world by the time I graduated because I'd trained in an environment controlled by not only the companies but also the I.Mech.E. So, I'd

developed a much better grounding in what it was like to be a real world engineer by the time I graduated.


D: Boeing developed a 707, what did the Brits have?



Frank: The VC10 which is a four-engine intercontinental range airliner. And they built forty of them before it went out of business.


D: Excuse me, I believe you said 40. You made my point, what happened there?



Frank: The Brits did not have the kind of marketing clout that Boeing had, and it was a bit of a quirky airplane. You know…if you imagine a 727, but with two engines at the back on either side. That is what the VC10 was like.


D: Was there name for that airplane?



Frank: It was just called a Vickers VC10.


D: What was the first commercial jet, I believe it was a BOAC?


Frank: It was the deHavilland Comet and went into service with BOAC in 1950 or 51, several years ahead of the 707.


John: What are those? The engines were in the wings?



Frank: Yes.


D: What happened with that design sir?



Frank: They did not understand metal fatigue and stress risers very well and they put in square cabin windows with sharp corners



John: That is when they exploded at altitude right?



Frank: Three of them crashed in the early days and it took them a long time to figure out what it was because they had to go to bring them up from the depth of the Mediterranean and bring them back to England and try and figure out what happened.


John: We talked about that quite a bit at Boeing, about how to design for fatigue in the fuselage.



Frank: A lot of this was developed by the Royal Aircraft Establishment – a British equivalent to Wright-Patterson Air Force Research Center. They did a lot of static testing with the fuselage in a water tank. And pumped up the water pressure and let it down. And pumped it and let it down. They found out that that is what was causing the corners of the windows to crack.